Despite significant progress in stroke prevention and its acute treatment, stroke remains the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of adult morbidity worldwide. Fundamental advances in stroke will require collecting and pooling advanced phenotype (e.g., neuroimaging) and genetic data from multiple centers. Description of and access to the data will also require a common stroke-specific lexicon. We have therefore initiated efforts to promote sharing and distribution of imaging and genetic data, www.strokedatabase.org and www.strokegenetics.org, and a lexicographic categorization tool, ccs.martinos.org. Using these portals, data and tools are available to individual research groups. We seek to expand our ability to distribute data and tools by linking our efforts to the infrastructure provided by the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN). We will initially distribute data using the BIRN service, Extensible Neuroimaging Archive Toolkit (XNAT) Central, to insure our data compatibility with the BIRN Data Repository (BDR). We will then work with BIRN domain experts to begin to incorporate stroke data specific terms into the BIRN ontology to ensure successful port and distribution of our data using the BDR. Linking our existing portals with BIRN resources has the potential to greatly facilitate data sharing which will benefit the understanding of stroke and speed discovery of new therapeutic interventions.